Mana Conquest: Vengeance

Greetings, and thanks for checking in here again today.

I have decided to make an attempt at regular updates.
I figure since I'm always working on it at least two days a week, I might as well provide updates concerning what I've finished for that week.

It's almost 6:00am my time, and my second overnight shift draws to a close soon.

Pretty much all that I've done in the last two days wasn't player facing content, a lot of it was ease-of-use upgrades to my existing system.

Caterpillar System:

• Modified the follower events so that battle animations could be called on them.

• Modified the follower events to that during a re-initialization of the caterpillar system, the follower events will walk to the hero's position, after being moved, meaning the screen doesn't need to be blanked every time an event moves the follower events, or your hero without the follower events following.

• Modified the follower events, and the caterpillar engine to no longer require the follower events to start in the same x/y position on every map

Banter system:

• Modified the banter system to run from the real-time clock included in the game clock plugin, instead of from the timekeeping system the game was previously using.

• Modified the banters so that they call battle animations on the follower events instead of the hero

• Updated some in game dialogues

Miscellaneous

• The in game item 'Pocket Watch' can no longer be used to show the in-game clock.

• Small bugfix concerning enemies that see you from really far away, having forgotten about searching for you before they finish getting to where they saw you.

I am starting to look into battle system plugins. I'm using Corti's right now, but it doesn't do exactly what I want it to do. The fights are dreadfully slow at low AGI values, and the disparity between a high AGI battler and a low one is too much for this to be a permanent solution.

Plans for next week:

• Figure out a way to work agility into one of PepsiOtaku's ATB modification plugins without making it completely broken.

• Use his Skill ID plugin to change the skill learning system around - rather than count battles, have it count the number of times a particular skill had been used.

• Finish implementing the text plugin for npcs on town maps.

• Sprites.

I think my intent is to release an updated version of the last demo, with all the plugins and system modifications running, but without any new content. I know that's kind of a dick move after like, three years with no updates, but I'd rather see a polished demo out sometime in the next few months, than see no new releases for a long ass time.

That's it for this week's update.

Later folks,


-Ramza